Saturday’s Ole Miss football game featured 50,000 fans, many of whom were cheering on the Rebels. A “Go! Rebels” chant is so much more inviting than “Go! Rebel Black Bears.”

What is in a name, anyway? This newspaper has not officially been The Vicksburg Evening Post for almost 20 years, yet folks around here continue to call it by that name, or for brevity sake, “E-nen Post.”

So it is likely that Ole Miss fans will continue to refer to the school’s team by that awful word, you know the one we cannot say, the one that comes before Black Bear… shhhh.

We cannot say that word, at least in reference to the University of Mississippi.

Even though that word is a symbol — one great American once said symbols are for the symbol-minded — it causes too much pain and heartache to say, let alone use it in reference to an athletic team.

To the national and international media, though, that word has been ballyhooed all summer. The Middle East — always a political powder keg — is undergoing massive social and political change. A group of mostly young people, fed up with the actions of their government, have risen in such places as Yemen, Egypt and Libya. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is under assault by a group of similar-thinking people.

The United States has intervened military and diplomatically in many of these uprisings, the latest being a bombing campaign to help depose Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. We are assisting the resistance, the rebels, as they are happily referred to. The national media is in love with these rebels.

There are rebel strongholds, rebel advances and rebel leaders. There are rebel tanks, rebel rockets and rebel spokesmen. The rebels are a force of good to be aided and cheered on to victory. These rebels deserve all the support we can muster, we are reminded, but Mississippi’s rebels, eh, not so much.

If the rebels from Oxford buckled under politically correct pressure to dump their nickname in favor of a bear, and being as the University is a state-funded institution using Americans’ tax dollars, would it not at least be prudent to ask those in the Middle East to have a bit more understanding? Should we reconsider our financial, diplomatic and military support until the protesters are referred to as the Middle East Rebel Camels? Rebel Sandstorms, perhaps?

Fair is fair. Ole Miss’ rebels, forget it; Middle East rebels, Hooray!

But then again, what’s in a name?

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Sean P. Murphy is web editor. He can be reached at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com